


...To Reduce The Choir To One Soloist

by blackorchids



Category: One Direction (Band), Radio 1 RPF
Genre: Coming Out, Established Relationship, Future Fic, Gen, Implied Past Harry Styles/Louis Tomlinson, M/M, Married Sex, Past Eleanor Calder/Louis Tomlinson, Tea, The X Factor, i'm really sorry that the summary sounds like a crap coming-of-age movie summary but it's 2am, there is a tiara
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-12
Updated: 2014-07-12
Packaged: 2018-02-08 12:39:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1941453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackorchids/pseuds/blackorchids
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ten years older doesn't necessarily mean ten years wiser, as Louis comes to find out when confronted with the very real issue that he's thirty-two years old and still technically in the proverbial closet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	...To Reduce The Choir To One Soloist

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hllangel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hllangel/gifts).



> Title stolen from the Acme album of the same name.
> 
> Written for Hllangel for the Tomlinshaw Fic Exchange! Enjoy, babe! :)

“Don’t you suppose it’s a bit silly?” Louis asks her, watching as she hides a smile behind the rim of her teacup. He and Eleanor had broken up years previously, but she remains, to this day, the only other person he knew who loved Yorkshire tea as much as he did.

“It seems more poetic than silly, to me,” Eleanor says wistfully, wrinkling her nose in just the way that had enchanted him when they were young and dumb and in love. “Full circle, babes.”

“Zayn says that X-Factor judges are washed-up have-beens,” Louis prompts, and is abruptly met with a face full of the tea that had once resided in his ex-girlfriend’s mouth. She shakes out her hair as she laughs, little crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes crinkling, faint smile lines around her mouth becoming pronounced in her split moment of uninhibited happy. Not for the first time, Louis wishes they’d lasted longer than they had—wishes he’d been better to her when they were spiraling downwards.

“Zayn’s the exact picture definition of starving artist,” Eleanor reminds him amusedly. “Jacked up on caffeine, smokes a pack a day, divorced, underappreciated—“

“—one-fifth of what was once the world’s highest grossing boyband ever to exist?” Louis shoots back because, well. He thinks it’s part of Zayn’s artist image, the slightly starved look and the chain-smoking. He did have a kid, though; a wide-eyed little monster with dark brown pig-tails and a strange love of the colour mauve. On Zayn’s days, the cigarettes were mostly hidden and the slightly over-caffeinated look evolved into full-on mania.

“Well, what does Niall think?” Eleanor asks after a minute. She’s refilled her teacup, wordlessly signaling that she planned on staying as long as it took her to convince Louis to do it. That’s fine, mostly, except that they’re in a public teashop and Louis can see a hairy man with a camera hidden in a bush across the parking lot. Eleanor’s fiancé is relatively understanding about the fact that the world thinks she’s still in cahoots with an ex-popstar, but Louis would really rather skip the inspiring phone call from one or more of his sisters—he’ll come out when he’s good and ready, dammit. 

“I haven’t spoken to him about it,” Louis mutters, which is true in the simplest of forms. Niall’s a bigshot music producer now, silly as ever once he gets a few pints in him, but busy as hell. Louis had grown tired of having a relationship with the man’s voicemail, so he’d just stopped calling. Whenever Niall’s newest signed band released their debut album, he’d likely invite everyone he’d ever met out for drinks and the pair of them would catch up then, but until that day came, Niall was going to be MIA.

“You know he’d be over the moon for you, Lou,” Eleanor says, setting her teacup down gently and taking Louis’ hand in between her own. They’re warmer than his own, partially from holding her cup and partially because Eleanor’s always so warm and soft. “I don’t know why you’re hesitating.”

“I feel like a lot more people are going to see things Zayn’s way than Niall’s,” he replies blithely, slipping his hand out from hers, but picking up his cup with both hands so that she won’t notice. She does anyway, but she doesn’t comment, instead sweeping her hair behind her ears and leaning forward.

“Louis.” She says meaningfully. “You’re going to meet all sorts of up-and-coming singers and you’re going to offer them guidance and advice like no one else ever could, babes.” She smiles wanly, wetting her glossed lips with her tongue and blinks a few times. “No one can possibly prepare them for everything that they’ll encounter if they make it to the top, but you can help lessen the blow.”

Movie reels of images flash before his eyes, Eleanor’s face fading away as memories of he and the lads, eighteen and younger, being signed onto a record deal for the first time. Young Louis, with his feathered fringe and hopeful blue eyes, an even younger boy with impossibly curly hair and the kind of crooked grin that you only ever read about in novels. It hadn’t been quite the secret-agent, forced-against-his-will stuff that the fans had imagined, but eighteen-year-old Louis hadn’t exactly been encouraged to come out as probably-bi way back when everything was new and fragile.

“I’m not some kind of wisdom-filled beacon of light,” Louis retorts petulantly, because he’s thirty-two going on thirteen according to his mum and that’s probably never going to change, probably only been enhanced by the ten or so years he’d spent having his every breath being dissected by the world.

“You’re going to do it,” Eleanor says after another minute of her watching him through unfathomable brown eyes. Her voice is no-nonsense, her teacup is empty, and she looks both fond and exasperated—an odd combination of emotions that only he seemed able to bring out in the prominent women in his life.

Louis knows he’s going to do it, but he wishes Eleanor would let him pretend for a little while longer.

*

His apartment is stunningly drab for someone of his level of wealth and fame. For a while there, he and the rest of the boys had had endless fun in buying the biggest and the best, overwhelmed and fascinated by the glitz and the glam that came with the dream-come-true of being famous for making music. Louis could clearly picture extravagant parties and entry halls befitting a palace, oddly shaped loungers that were more interesting to look at than comfortable to sit on, paintings and center pieces that were worth more than the mortgage of his childhood home.

On his thirtieth birthday, he’d sold the flat and most of the things in it, keeping the Lichtenstein and the enormous Tetris lighting unit because, while he wasn’t Zayn and couldn’t appreciate the artistic value and composition of them, he did think they were rather brilliant.

Louis is just as messy as he’d been in Sixth form, the wobbly table in the relatively unused kitchen covered in magazines and letters and the occasional important document, all serving as a sort of table-sized place setting for his takeaway cartons and ever-growing collection of unused chop-sticks. Right now, though, he’d shoved most of it to one side and was looking over his copy of the damn _The X Factor_ contract he’d received in the post. It had already been signed by him and his agent, but once in a while, Liam’s dad’s voice filtered in, reminding the boys to never sign something without reading over it for unmentioned stipulations.

Way back when they’d all been teenagers, they’d taken to sharing parents, bouncing around from household to household because Harry didn’t really have a father figure and Louis had too many and Niall had grown used to sisters even though he was the only one who didn’t have any of his own. It had been a mish-mash of accents and family traditions, the Paynes’ home was where they all went most often for the holidays because Liam’s parents had the largest sitting room, largest Christmas tree, most space for a group of rag-tag boys and their own families to join in.

The familiar swearing that came out of anyone’s mouth when they tried to open his sticky front door finally reached his ears, followed by the clank of keys on the tiny glass front table and the heavy sound of a shoulder meeting wood as his visitor forces the wooden door shut once more.

Nick clomps into the kitchen, a bag of t.v. dinners swinging from one arm, a paper in the other. He’s wearing his most appalling denim shorts and a disgustingly yellow Justin Bieber pre-haircut shirt that Louis had given him as a (mostly) gag-gift on their anniversary two winters ago. Louis had hoped Nick would burn it in some sort of showy demonstration of his hatred of mainstream music, but Nick’s eyes had gleamed wickedly with an unspoken promise that he would do his very best to wear the damned thing as much as proper social-conduct allowed.

“Hey,” Louis says as pleasantly as he can manage with that monstrosity pushing him to gouge out his eyeballs and possibly break things off with his long-term _beau_ , as Nick’s friends liked to call them.

They don’t live together, but they might as well for how often they spend the nights in each others’ flats and how comfortable they are in the spaces even outside of the bedroom. Nick doesn’t even hand Louis a carton of food, just tosses three more packets of chop sticks on the table and rinses off a fork from the shallow sink. 

Louis watches as the older man picks at the less-than savory Thai food for a few minutes, cackles gleefully when a particularly sticky lump of what is advertised to be chicken falls off the fork and lands with a splat on Justin’s face. Nick blows out a huge gust of air and looks faintly relieved that his shirt is ruined, confirming what Louis already knew; that Nick was just as irritated by the yellow and the Justin as Louis had been; that he’d just been wearing it to be irritating.

The flat is quiet, Nick flicking on the electric tea kettle before making his way out of the kitchen and down the hall, likely to look for a clean shirt. He’ll be stopped, as he always is, by the mirror in the living room. He’ll spend some time pressing the pads of his fingers into the laugh lines that have permanently gathered at the corners of his eyes, comb through his hair—worn curly nearly always, now—searching for any streak of silver. Nick had gotten his first grey hair four and a half years previously, coinciding with the first time he’d kissed Louis. When Louis was feeling particularly nasty, he’d throw out the fact that he was _obviously_ just being used as some sort of prop meant to make Nick look and feel younger, which was a stupid statement in itself since Louis still wasn’t _out_ to the general public and the fact that they were even dating at all had been England’s most well-kept secret for nearly half a decade.

Eventually though, the dark-haired man comes back into the room, shoes finally toed off to reveal Barbie socks, Kelly-green short-sleeved button-up replacing the now-binned shirt. Nick tosses the tabloid on top of Louis’ contract and jabs a long finger at the headline, which. Which reads _England’s Ex-Popstar Louis Tomlinson BACK ON With Old Flame Eleanor Calder_. It’s the picture of the two of them taking tea three days prior; one where Eleanor’s smiling at him, her eyes crinkling at the corners, her hand poised and pouring him more tea as he _pouts_ at her.

A split-second of all-encompassing fury erupts inside of him—anger and hatred, for the photographer who stole this private moment of shared happiness away from them, for the _damn_ Daily Mail unapologetically taking it and making it public for all the world to see. Nick’s talking, though, and Louis escapes his head long enough to hear the end of his sentence, affection for his prat of a boyfriend quelling any negative feelings in a heartbeat.

“—back on. Should I be worried, Princess?” he asks and Louis huffs out a mocking laugh, scooping up the magazine and lobbing it at Nick’s amused face. “Just tell me when girls start to do it for you again,” he says a little meanly and Louis wishes he’d waited to throw the magazine, because _that_ deserved it more than the first one.

“Girls are brilliant,” Louis says matter-of-factly because it’s quite true, despite the whole relatively-gay thing. Who needs strict labeling, anyway? “Far prettier than _you_ , Grimmy.”

Nick puts on his most hurt expression before binning the waste of trees and shoving the pile of crap from his side of the table into the center and settling down on his chair, continuing to poke around his carton of takeaway with a sort of morbidly curious look twisting his long nose and the slightly too-thin lips that Louis is secretly overwhelmingly fond of.

“It’s scarcely ten in the morning,” Louis points out vacantly, when Nick finally thinks to offer him the other carton. “Where did you even find a place open this early?”

“I have connections,” Nick says mysteriously and Louis wonders for a minute if these are Pixie’s leftovers from the evening prior. He thinks about verbalizing his sudden craving for a feta cheese-and-spinach egg-white omelet, but he can’t come up with a way to make that sound less spoiled-popstar-brat and he’s trying too hard to focus on the damn contract to deal with coming up with bitchy witticisms so he and Nick can bicker back and forth for a while before they have utterly (fantastically) married sex in the bedroom.

“What’re you reading so intently?” Nick asks once he’s finally finished avoiding anything that could possibly be mistaken as healthy.

“Your eating habits are shit, Grimmy,” Louis comments snidely, partially because it’s true and partially because he can already picture Nick’s delighted cackle once the man discovers exactly what sort of job offer Louis has been presented with.

Over the past year and a half, media attention on Louis has decreased exponentially through expert-level disguises and avoidance, as well as the fact that he hasn’t much done anything to note since his few minor roles in various movies and telly dramas. This permanent judge-spot on The X Factor, though, will toss him straight back into super-stardom. The press and the public will eat up the poetic irony that is an X Factor prodigy coming back to look for new up-and-comings.

Nick’ll cackle and crow and mock, but he’ll be pleased for Louis, because he’ll know—because he somehow _always_ knows—that this is important, that Louis is going to grab onto this and hold tight with both hands. A judge on The X Factor. It’s unreal, is what it is. And the super-stardom is going to put an unfamiliar sort of strain on their secretive relationship and _how_ hadn’t he and El gotten to this part during tea?

“Don’t laugh too hard,” Louis warns as he finally hands over the contract, watching as Nick’s long fingers curl around it, his lips already pulling at the corner. “Wouldn’t want the neighbors to hear your unmistakable bray.”

“Love it when you shower me with your kind words,” Nick retorts before his mouth falls open inelegantly and he huffs out a choked noise. “An _X Factor_ judge?” he queries incredulously, his accent slipping out in his disbelief. “That parallelism’s the stuff of pre-teenaged girls’ first fanfictions and crappy coming-of-age movies.”

And then Louis is laughing, mirth bubbling up and pouring from his lips, because, well. Isn’t that what he’d said? Isn’t that _just_ what he’d said to Eleanor, only somehow funnier, better, truer. Nick looks a bit surprised that Louis gave him this laugh so easily, that he hadn’t had to work for it the way he usually does, the way he won’t admit that he still loves to do. Surprised, but he also looks incredibly pleased. He’s smiling with his eyes, the edges of his lips turned up, affection coming off of him in waves.

“That’s what I said,” Louis gets out breathlessly, clamoring onto his knees on the chair and leaning over the mess on the table, grips Nick’s chin with the hand that isn’t being used to steady his own body. Curls his fingers tight around Nick’s jaw, yanking his face forward a bit and slotting their lips together, sloppy and fast, the way they’d done it in the beginning. Nick drops the contract and the unbound papers scatter everywhere. He pulls Louis closer and things get kicked off from the table and it’ll be positively hellish to find each page of the contract, but it’s worth it.

Because they have utterly married sex on the kitchen table. And, yes, it’s _fantastic_ , thank you very much.

*

Louis nearly totals his car two mornings later when he hears Liam’s long-familiar laugh intermingling with Nick’s and—and that ruddy bastard hadn’t even mentioned he was interviewing one of Louis’ best mates.

“Your next album’s set to drop in a week, Liam Payne,” Nick’s saying and Louis allows himself to feel a smug sense of pride because not only had he already known that but Liam had _done_ it. Liam’d been their band’s Justin—Timberlake, not Bieber. “Lucky number three—what can you tell us about it that you haven’t told anyone else?”

“Well the sound is definitely a bit more mature,” Liam says seriously and Louis chokes on a laugh nearly the same time Liam’s faux-seriousness fails and he starts giggling. “No, I—this one’s got a few of those ever-popular love songs,” Liam admits, shy as always when he’s talking about something personal. Suddenly, fiercely, Louis wishes he and the rest of the boys were at that interview with him, reassuring him that he was allowed to share, lending him the confidence he needed to speak his mind. But Liam was thirty now, grown up and successfully made a name for himself outside of One Direction. The shyness passed. “Most of them are a bit slower than my last two albums,” Liam continues, stronger. “It was important that I got them out there, and it felt like now was finally time for it.”

Nick’s silent for three seconds—he’s going to be lectured for it later, Louis thinks gleefully, glad of the small form of retribution for the unnecessary secret-keeping. He blows out a puff of air on-mic though, and then laughs, impressed. 

“Liam Payne,” Nick says, and Louis thinks he’s probably clapped the younger man too-hard on the shoulder. Liam can take it though; he’d always been the bulkiest of them all. “Catch _So This Is Life_ debuting only on this radio station in six days. You’ll be back for the first listening, Liam Payne?”

“Of course I will,” Liam’s tinny voice says sincerely to the millions of listeners this early in the morning. “I hope you guys like it.”

Nick tries to shame Liam into playing an old crowd favorite—innuendo bingo—and Louis jabs his finger into the radio’s power button. Liam’ll end up agreeing in no time and Louis is _tired_ suddenly. One of his songs is on Liam’s new album, an odd sort of gift that he’d been giving Liam every time it was time to produce a new one. He knew Liam still sometimes felt guilty that he was the only one who was still writing and playing music and singing and doing world tours, even though the rest of them had done relatively well finding their own paths after the dissolution of their unhealthily co-dependent boy-band with a rock-edge.

It had been Zayn who’d suggested it at the beginning, back after they’d first split up and Liam had nervously decided to come to them with the desire to keep going on his own, and Niall jumping to agree, but Louis had been the one who’d managed an entire song every single time. Liam looked at it as sort of a blessing to keep going and to do the best he could possibly do, and Louis was always so, so _proud_ to hear his crummy words worked into something amazing with Liam’s vocal range and aptitude for not letting his music get over synthesized. Louis privately thinks that this album will either be a complete flop, or.

Or it’ll beat out every other album Liam’s been a part of, solo and group.

At some kind of weird, late lunch in Ian’s flat the next afternoon, Louis watches how everyone is very careful to avoid getting him in any of their photos. In a group picture, Finchy points out that you can kind of see Louis’ reflection in the darkened window and they have to delete it and take another.

Louis finishes slipping on his beanie, hoodie, and sunglasses. Waits for Nick to finish saying goodbye to everyone before he can pull on an inconspicuous jumper and a ludicrous fisherman’s cap, his own pair of shades balanced carefully on the bridge of his nose as he laughs at something Fiona calls out. Leaves first, knowing Nick will wait until he sees Louis get into the car from the tiny window in the stairwell before he exits the building as well.

Ian’s flat is a good distance from Nick’s, and Louis keeps his face turned away from his boyfriend’s, eyes on street lights and trees and the last of the children playing in the streets flying by. The car is dark, the windows darker, and suddenly Louis can’t breathe. He jerks until he manages to get his elbow in the little automatic window-opening switch and sucks in fresh air as subtly as he can.

“You okay?” Nick asks when he pulls up in front of Louis’ building. They’d sat quietly in the car for a few moments before he’d spoken, the pair of them listening to one another breathe over the hum of the engine. “You got kind of quiet back there.”

Louis draws in a steadying breath and looks over at Nick, evening sunlight illuminating hazel eyes until they’re nearly glowing. Nick furrows his eyebrows when Louis doesn’t reply straight away with his standard “ _’m fine_ ” and his lips twist like he knows he should say something comforting but he isn’t quite sure what won’t make him sound like a prat. Slowly, Louis unbuckles his seatbelt and manually removes it from across his torso, clenching and unclenching his hands for a few heartbeats before he leans up and presses an absurdly chaste kiss against Nick’s bewildered mouth.

“I rather like you,” Louis says blandly when he leans back, watches as the confusion fades away from Nick’s expression, is replaced with amusement.

“Good thing ‘m not wasting my time then,” Nick replies sardonically, “If it only took you four and a half years to decide you _like_ me.”

“Wank to photos of teenaged-me in braces,” Louis says wickedly, spilling out of the car before Nick can strangle him, admiring how close his boyfriend gets to _accidentally_ knocking into him with the bumper of the car.

Louis takes the stairs slowly, stopping at every landing to stand stock-still with his arms at his sides and his eyes closed. He unlocks the door to his flat and lunges at it expertly, preening a bit when it opens on his first go. Yanking off the beanie and tossing the sunglasses onto the entrance table, he is not prepared for the sight that greets him in his sitting room. Louis wonders if this is why Nick hadn’t protested at all when he’d quietly said he wanted to spend the night alone tonight.

“Louis!” Niall shouts gleefully, leaping up with the same enthusiasm that he’d had four stone ago, spilling half of the pint he’d been guzzling down. He stares at the puddle for a while before looking back up at Louis with a shifty expression adorning his features. Zayn shakes out his too-shaggy hair and rolls his eyes, sucking a drag out of his cigarette that he _knows_ he’s not meant to be smoking inside, and Liam looks torn between hugging Louis and going to fetch a towel before the beer spreads.

“Haven’t seen _you_ in a while, Haz,” Louis says finally when the rest of them have finished hugging him. Harry’s been waiting patiently, tanned and wearing jeans that could pass as El’s favourite leggings for how tight they are. He’s bound to be covered in new tattoos, but his flowy blue button-down is long-sleeved and the only one Louis can see runs up the left side of his neck in small lettering that he can’t make out from the distance. “You even washed your hair.” It’s in a ponytail similar to that of Orlando Bloom, but beggars can’t be choosers, Louis supposes.

“Figured it was long over-due,” Harry replies, inching forward, his movements shy and small despite his lanky frame that even Liam hadn’t managed to surpass once he’d finally stopped growing. “Was surprised to read that you and El were back on,” he returns, twitching his head to one side in just the bitchy sort of move he’d learnt from Louis nearly fifteen years ago. The grin pulling at his lips rather ruins the effect, though, but Louis can’t even be indignant, because then he and Harry are hugging tight, the proper kind of hug shared between two brothers who haven’t seen one another in years. The others look on, Zayn muttering to Liam and Niall about the Lichtenstein hanging on the wall, jealousy evident because his starving-tortured artist image can’t just go and buy a priceless painting for his sitting room.

“Back home,” Louis mutters in Harry’s shoulder, pads of his fingers pressing hard, Harry’s hands gripping his hoodie tight.

“Missed you,” Harry replies, bumping his temple gently against Louis’ before he slowly starts to release his vice-hold on the poor cheap cotton of the zip-up. Finally, _finally_ , they separate, and Liam and Niall shove Louis’ couch and table to the far end of the small room, removing the cushions and dragging them to the centre of the floor while Zayn goes to find sheets and a duvet and Harry opens the windows. Louis jogs into his kitchen, moving quickly because the childish part of his mind believes if he doesn’t hasten, he’ll return to the living room and the boys won’t have been there at all. He brings back three bags of crisps and a few packets of chocolate biscuits.

They sit in a circle, snacks in the middle, and take turns sharing bits and pieces of happenings in their lives apart—Liam is bashful when Louis mentions having heard him on the radio with Nick, Zayn actually blushes when Niall recalls seeing a _Malik original_ hanging in some corporate office, all four of them enthralled when Harry shares stories of traveling the world without the glamour of One Direction to hide behind. 

“So, I asked Perrie out,” Zayn says offhandedly after a beat of silence and Louis wants to crow that he’s not the only one who sucks at relationships—they all do, actually.

“You asked your ex wife, the mother of your child, and the woman who became the Justin of Little Mix out on a date?” Liam clarifies incredulously and Zayn sniffs.

“Didn’t realise you asked out so many ladies, Zee,” Louis jokes, relishing in Niall’s delighted cackle, in Harry’s quiet chuckle, in the reluctant amused head-shaking Liam always did. 

“She’s nice, you know?” Zayn muses absently, fingers playing with the patch of skin that Perrie’s likening is forever more inked on. “Makes me happy.”

“ _Dogs_ make you happy, Zayn,” Louis points out, rather unfairly, for someone who’s been sneaking around with a boy like a bloody fifteen-year-old girl. Louis thinks about this, and very pointedly refuses to acknowledge the mocking looks the rest of the boys shoot at him. “Don’t you think dating your ex-wife is a bad idea?”

“No,” Zayn says stubbornly, before clearing his throat and fixing Louis with a _look_. “But I’d love to hear about how Eleanor’s doing. I’ve not seen her in some time—hafta catch up one of these days over tea.”

Louis scowls, throwing the icky peppermint toffee biscuits that only Nick likes at Zayn, and then at Niall, who’s laughing the most obviously.

“Didn’t realise you asked out so many ladies, Zee,” Niall whispers to himself and there is a noticeable pause wherein they all stare at him and he continues snickering quietly and stuffing cheesy crisps into his mouth for a handful of seconds before he notices.

“We’ve moved past that, Nialler,” Liam prompts and Niall scoffs, rolling his eyes.

“Yes, Louis still can’t find his balls and tell the world he likes it in the arse,” Niall says impatiently and Zayn chokes, hacking away until Harry smacks him too-hard in the back. Zayn glares and Harry shrugs and Louis stares at Niall with his mouth a little bit ajar.

“What?” Niall asks blankly when they continue to stare at him. “Zayn and I saw Louis over the holiday,” he says blandly, “Nick wasn’t there and no one knew why but us.”

“You also got pissed and snogged the wrong sister at midnight,” Zayn says, because Zayn’s a true mate. Niall flushes, ruddy and blotchy, scowling petulantly at them all when they snicker at him.

“Can’t we just focus on Lou’s wreck of a love life this time?” he asks, and Louis blinks, because for just a moment, he could’ve sworn Niall was blonde again and they were twenty and in a tour bus, trying to get Louis to talk about his failing relationship with Eleanor. He blinks again, and he’s back, Niall’s slightly-receding hairline, Zayn’s other arm inked up, Liam’s face only so familiar anymore because Louis spent an embarrassingly large portion of his time listening to his best mate’s albums whenever he felt nostalgic.

“I know,” Louis says finally, when he’s done having an age-related panic attack because he’s _not_ Nick, and he shouldn’t be having those. “Nick turns forty at the end of the summer,” Louis continues, “and he’d never admit it, but I know he wants to go out and get hammered and wear a dress and act like he did when he was twenty five, but I know he won’t do it if he can’t drag me along.”

“He’ll understand,” Harry says gently. “If you’re still not ready.”

“Haz—” Louis starts, without really knowing how he’d like to finish. It wasn’t that he wasn’t ready, _exactly_. It was more that he’d grown used to being in the closet, to sneaking around and having the world think he was still in the midst of some sort of long, drawn-out relationship with Eleanor. 

“Have you even talked about this with him?” Zayn asks reasonably and Louis’ teenaged self is rebelling inside, shouting that he doesn’t want to discuss this rationally—that he doesn’t want to discuss this at all. Louis pushes fringe-boy down and away, dragging a hand through his hair and absently noticing that Zayn is still bloody smoking. 

“Well, what am I supposed to say, then?” Louis demands, impatient with only himself, half a mind to leap to his feet and pace around. He can’t stop his fingers from tapping, though, even as he commands his body to stay where it is. “‘Hey, I think it’s time I start telling people we’re shagging?’”

“Yes,” Zayn replies plaintively, even as Liam corrects him with _dating_ and Harry frowns at him like an angry puppy.

“You’re in love with Grimmy,” Harry says, his lips pushed out a little, pouting and sounding much more like his eighteen-year old self than he had since his voice had dropped down so many octaves it was probably residing in the depths of hell. “I _know_ you are, Louis, and Grimmy will keep you two a secret forever because he’s in love with you too and he’s too much of a ninny to fess up and admit that he’d quite like to show you off to the world, but _you have got to do something_.”

Zayn leans over and wraps an arm around Harry, pulling the man close and allowing him to tuck his body against Zayn’s like they’re children again.

“I will,” Louis finds himself promising, before he’s really sure what he’s saying. Even when he realises though, he can’t make himself take it back. “I’ll fix it, okay, Haz?”

*

“What are you doing later today?” Louis follows Nick into the bathroom, bouncing on the balls of his feet despite the ungodly early hour. Nick’s brushing his teeth but he’s also staring at Louis through the mirror with a mildly terrified expression on his face. Louis _never_ gets up this early, bats Nick away whenever he’s conscious enough to feel what is most likely a daily kiss to the temple when Nick drags himself away from the bed and into the shower.

“Lunching with Hazza,” Nick mumbles around his tooth brush, spitting in the sink without removing his eyes from Louis’ form. Louis glances away from Nick’s reflection to study his own, taking in the bed head and the manic wideness of his eyes. He shrugs internally, accepting Nick’s terror without complaint and edging closer.

“At that crap vegan place you like?” Louis presses intently despite the fact that he knows it’s at that crap vegan place because Harry told him it would be at that crap vegan place three days ago. He shrugs externally this time and grabs his own tooth brush, lining it with too much toothpaste so that most of it will fall in little green globules in Nick’s sink, just the way the older man _despises_. Louis stuffs the brush into his mouth and listens as Nick sings his praise for that crap vegan place whilst he tries to sort out his curls, which are a little wrecked from Louis’ hands in them the previous night and smooshed on side from Nick’s pillow.

“Do they have a telly?” Louis asks, cutting Nick off in the middle of his sentence and not realising it until he’s being scowled at by a man in a pink button-down decorated with hundreds of round boobs. Louis didn’t even know where Nick found a shirt like that and spent a minute contemplating the pros and cons of ruining it before it could make it to the next load of laundry before he remembers he asked something. He repeats the question and Nick fixes him with an unimpressed look.

“Yes,” the man says in a tone of voice that leaves no mistaking that he’d already responded once before.

“Fancy,” Louis offers for lack of anything better to say and Nick stares, abandoning his citrus-scented hair product to follow Louis out into the lounge and to the door of the flat.

“Where are you going?” Nick asks, completely bewildered. “It’s half-five in the morning on a Wednesday.”

“Places to go, people to see,” Louis says vaguely, finally understanding why his mother had delighted so much in giving such a vague response to him when he was a child. Watching the frustration rise in the other person’s expression is positively lovely.

“Let me know if you remember any important plans for today!” Nick shouts after him as he makes his way down the stairs and Louis bites down on his laughter when he hears old Mrs. Norris throw open her door and begin to lecture Nick on the proper morning etiquette when living in a building.

Lots of important plans today, Louis thinks gleefully. Nick’ll only turn forty once, no matter how hard he tries.

He stops off at his place first to shower and change, picking up the gift he’d ordered months ago from his doorstep and thanking god that the weird guy Albert hadn’t yet had the time to sneak out and steal it. 

It’s nine and Louis is at the bakery examining the cake he’d ordered when he gets Finchy’s first text message.

 **29.09 _received at 9:04am:_** nick actually thinks no1 remembered  
**29.09 _received at 9:04am:_** keeps casually asking if we can get drinks 2nite  
**29.09 _received at 9:05am:_** pretends hes not offended wen we say we got plans  
**29.09 _received at 9:07am:_** ha idiot

Louis snickers at his phone, declares the cake perfect, and waits for them to wrap it up. He escapes the bakery without hassle and mentally checks off the last item on his Harry-approved list. Completed to-do lists feel very grown-up and Louis has the sudden urge to call his mother just to tell her that he’s finally an adult. He doesn’t, but it’s a close thing.

He decides to erase his newfound adult status with a nap. Turns off his phone and sets his iPod alarm and sprawls in the next that he has yet to clear away from when the boys stayed the night. Wakes up late because even if he is an adult, he’s still Louis.

*

The venue is utterly packed when Louis gets there, half an hour early so that he can bother to decorate the private room upstairs, even though he knows they won’t be in it for long. Louis hopes that Harry managed to do his job properly and submerge Nick’s phone in some kind of beverage, because word had gotten out that the lads of One Direction were congregating at this high-end bar Niall had suggested. Liam had wanted to revisit memory lane at the Funky Buddha, but that idea had been shot down before Niall could remember how much he loved their Bahama Mamas.

The owner of the bar lets Louis in from the back, helps him carry the few boxes up the stairs, wishes Nick a happy birthday because he _knows_ they’re all going to be toeing the line of socially acceptable levels of tipsy and drunken and disorderly within two hours. Louis hangs a truly horrifying amount of streamers and ribbons and banners from the ceiling and walls, blowing up a few balloons and tossing them around, yanking the helium-filled ones from their weighted bin-bags. He ties the _Princess_ one around the back of the chair at the head of the table, sets a sparkly tiara and wand set down on the plate because he’s truly an ass.

The cake is in the bar freezer, the gift from Nick’s parents and the ones from his sisters sitting on the present table with Louis’ own. Olivia shows up ten minutes early and cackles like the teenager she’s not any longer when she sees all of the pink and the glitter.

“Oh, he’s going to kill you,” she says, and then chokes when Zayn and Niall pound their way up the stairs, shoddily-covered canvas carried between them. Zayn painted it—a giant reproduction of a photo of Nick dressed as Lily Allen.

“I bought the canvas and the paints,” Niall is protesting to Zayn, who’d seemed to have discovered Niall’s name on the gift tag, squashed in under the generic ‘love from the Maliks’ that Zayn wrote on more personalized gifts.

“You just forgot your own gift, haven’t you?” Zayn retorts and Niall shrugs easily before leaping a foot in the air when Olivia approaches them because he hadn’t seen her coming.

Fiona, LMC, and Pixie show up next, three brightly-wrapped packages with them, and Louis greets them all, tells them to go crazy with the few bottles of wine that are up here. More and more of Nick’s friends and Nick-and-Louis’ friends trickle in, over half of them late like Louis knew they would be. The ones who hadn’t known Louis and Nick were dating until this afternoon congratulated him, shook his hand, told him to keep Nick behaved. Soon the room starts to feel slightly over-stuffed. Zayn announces that Harry and Nick are at the bar, and it’s an entire ten minutes later before he announces that they’re coming up the stairs and Louis wonders what sort of excuse Harry had fed the older man to get him here, much less up the stairs.

The lights are flicked off and only the tacky rainbow Christmas lights are glowing, setting a few faces alight in greens and reds and blues and everyone holds their breath, hearing Nick’s grumbling as he fiddles with the door.

Door opens, lights flick on, and Nick squawks in a way he will spend the rest of his life denying to anyone who cares to listen. He’s wearing, of all things, an ugly Christmas jumper over pastel purple shorts, and Louis wonders what the hell he’s doing dating someone who is so obviously fashionably challenged. Nick looks dazed, bewildered, slightly overwhelmed, underneath the social butterfly mask that falls into place nearly immediately as people surge forward to hug him or press a drink into his hand or shake his free hand or clap him too-hard on the back and congratulate him on landing someone with an arse like _that_.

Okay, so that last one was Niall and Zayn, but it wasn’t as though people _disagreed_.

Louis sits back, watches with some more of that disgusting fondness he feels whenever he looks at Nick, as the man in question is passed around the room, the tiara fixed on his head, the wand squished in his fist between his hand and his cup. Louis doesn’t even notice Harry step up next to him until Harry’s leaning forward and twanging the elastic on the dumb party hats Louis and Olivia had put on and promptly forgotten about. He steals Louis’ drink and regards him with wide green eyes over the rim of the cup.

“Knew you were throwing the party,” Harry says with all the casualty he can muster, which, admittedly, isn’t much. “Didn’t know you’d be confessing in your _The X Factor_ pre-show judge interview that you were currently in a very sexually satisfying relationship with Radio 1’s very own Nick Grimshaw.”

“Overkill?” Louis asks and Harry grins, shaking his head, his absurdly long hair fluttering about.

“He choked on his low-soy chai tea and it spilt all over his boob-shirt,” Harry says cheerfully. “Only thing I had in my car was that jumper.”

“D’you think I should’ve warned him?” Louis asks quietly, regretting his impulsive move for the first time. He’d known about the party too; the decision to bare all during the brief interview he’d had to go to the week before the last hadn’t been made until the words were already out of his mouth.

Harry’s saved from answering though, because Nick’s finally made it to the farthest corner of the room where the pair of them had been standing. He’s covered in glitter and silly string, his tiara crooked, his wand still in his hand. He ignores Harry in favor of staring at Louis, his eyes wide and pretty under the Christmas lights, his expression slightly glazed over but mostly amazed.

“You—” Nick says, only Louis isn’t sure if the word is actually verbalised or if it’s just mouthed, because Harry has escaped to the stereos to turn up the music so that people start dancing and mingling instead of paying attention to what could possibly end up in shits if Nick’s reacted to this poorly. “ _You_ —” Nick tries again, but then he seems to register that the voice over the speakers is familiar and Harry’s voice, farther away, is shouting insistences that this is just a funny coincidence. It’s Liam singing, the song that Louis had written for him, so, so long ago.

 _Naked Walls_ is about a lot of things—from the fast-paced life where they’d lived in and out of hotel rooms far more than they’d slept in their own beds under their own roofs, to the transition from boyband to five separate young men learning how to live without each other just a room away, from the drastic change between high-end flat filled with priceless pieces to tiny closet with just the bare necessities. It’s about keeping up with life and not letting life mow you down, Louis thinks. It’s a little bit odd to hear it playing, professionally recorded and produced, playing on the radio. It’s Liam’s voice, but those are _his_ words, honest and brutal, just how his confession had been on the telly this afternoon.

“On _The X Factor_?” Nick manages, truly disbelieving, and Louis can’t much blame him. Eleanor would be beside herself with the poetic irony; Louis coming out on the very same show he’d discovered his sexuality on. Or, something. Nick repeats his incredulous not-question, his tone a little different and Louis can hear the other questions beneath it; _are you sure_ standing out the loudest of them all.

He shrugs a bit, chuffs out a relieved laugh—relieved that he’s out, that it’s over, that Nick’s here with him, even after five years of sneaking around like idiots. The world didn’t implode, even if Twitter did have to shut down for a few hours afterwards.

“You.” Nick says, quieter, surging forward and pressing his palms up to cup either side of Louis’ face. Nick slots their lips together, licking into Louis’ mouth with abandon, kissing him hard and fast and a little bruising, even though Louis can still feel the insane amounts of _love_ beneath it all. “You.” Is pulled out of Nick’s mouth one more time, nothing more than a breath, between kisses, and it’s not a fragment leading into some kind of half-hysterical rant or concern this time. It’s a sentence, and it sums up Louis’ thoughts about Nick pretty well. 

When they pull away, Louis reaches out to straighten out Nick’s tiara. “Figured it was long over-due,” he says.

**Author's Note:**

> I really, really, really hope that this counts as filling your first prompt (coming out), because this fic kept getting away from me and I kept having to force it back the right direction.  
> Also, I apologize for the back-and-forth with British spelling--I'm American working on an American computer and sometimes it slips out and sometimes my word-processor swaps it back for me. I'll go and edit it eventually (I always say this but I never do, so; fair warning).
> 
> come talk to me or prompt me on tumblr [@rosalinesbenvolio](http://www.rosalinesbenvolio.tumblr.com)!!


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